Virtually Free Server R2

John Howard recently left Technet and moved on to become a Program Manager for Windows Virtualisation. Today he announces, on the heel of many rumors, that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is indeed free. Why, you may ask?

Although there are many reasons (see presspass site), the nutshell answer is relatively straightforward. If you look into the future of where we're heading with Windows Virtualisation in the Longhorn Server timeframe, virtualisation can be thought of as a "commodity" – commonplace, extensively used and most importantly free functionality out of the box. Windows Virtualisation will include full migration capability from Virtual Server 2005 R2 to Windows Virtualisation, so this is somewhat of a no-brainer to get people onto the next release.

Enterprise edition is free, both 32bit and 64bit one.